Month: August 2014

One of the most important things that you can do as a business hoping to get seen online is to make sure that you have created a local business page and then make sure that it is verified. Local Business pages are designed to go with local search and your local customers will want to know that you are a genuine business. That is what the verification does – note the small tick in a shield just below right of the logo in the image above.

There are several pieces of the puzzle that need to be in place.

You need to have an existing Google account. This will already be the case if you have a Gmail or Google Apps for Business account.

You will then need to set up the local business details with Google.

You will then need to verify your local business details.

It’s then a good idea to set up a Google Plus page to go with your business.

I was chatting with a client last week discussing the dreaded DRP. For large corporations the Disaster Recovery Plan is a many paged document listing assets, resources, staff, and time frames and also defining what is an isn’t critical. This document will have cost many hours of time and much tearing of hair in creation and management. There will be required annual reviews and tests and there will be an army of IT staff, managers and auditors to ensure that the DRP is not only fit for purpose but tested and proven.

Despite all of this many large organisations slip up on either periodic reviews of their DRP or testing, or both. There’s no point backing up to a tape if the tape won’t restore properly. There’s no point in designating a secondary site if you’ve never proven that you can work effectively from that secondary site alone. The larger the business the more difficult it is to test.

What about the SME?

If it’s that difficult for large organisations to manage backups and disaster recovery plans, what hope is there for the SME or the one man band? The key is to think differently to the larger organisation. Traditionally the SME will have a Small Business Server of some sort containing critical data. This server will have some sort of local backup process running, but it is more than likely that the backups haven’t been checked or tested in months, if not years. The media may have failed, there may be no off site storage of backups because no-one has taken ownership of the task. This is because the SME just doesn’t have the resource to allocate to this sort of maintenance task. So, what do we do?

Think Laterally

With the move to more networked environments the local server is becoming more and more redundant. Why not consider either a partial or total move to cloud storage? Take your files and store them on Google Drive or Dropbox or Onedrive. You can either move them to the cloud and work on them there, or use one of the available sync applications to sync your existing server your cloud storage. Typically the space used by documents, spreadsheets etc. is minimal and will fit very easily into basic cloud allowances.

More and more of those vertical applications – those business specific applications that are essential to your line of business – are available in hosted versions. If your provider offers this for your accounting software or your CRM applications or your industry specific applications (legal, motor, estate agency, accountancy or other industries) then investigate the possibility of moving to a hosted platform. Not only will this give you peace of mind because backup is now part of their provision to you, but you will also win out on being able to access your application outside of the office if needed.

Embracing the Cloud

Once we get our SME mindset away from mimicking big business ways of doing things and begin to embrace the new technologies and methodologies available to us we will see that the momentum is now with the smaller business: we can change providers more easily, our data is smaller and much more manageable even within the constraints of the base cloud packages. We can store emails, documents and with some work even host our bespoke database outside of our offices – available from anywhere and from many different devices. The incidental benefit of this is that if our physical place of business is lost to us temporarily or more permanently we will still be able to continue to run our businesses effectively while restoring what was lost. So let’s make the most of that small business ability to respond quicker to new technology. Let’s plan not just for disaster but for a more agile way of working, one that by default is robust, resilient and ready for disaster, and ready for continuity.